The reason so many Americans fall into a panic
about things like Ebola is because they don't grasp why it's safer
here than elsewhere. No, we don't know for certain that the outbreak
of Ebola will not occur on a wide scale in America. But what we do
know is that it's a lot less likely here, and lots of experience tells
us this. And we also know that however bad it might get here -- with
Ebola, or anything else -- it won't be nearly as bad as places, like
Africa, where it was much easier for the disease to take off and
spread.

Not so long as freedom, innovation, capitalism,
and rational science remain as dominant as they have. If those things
go -- then we will be in serious trouble, just like most of the rest
of the world, and just like nearly all of human history prior to the
last century or two.

Journalists, whom polls regularly
show to be overwhelmingly left-wing, frequently mock/lament/predict
the downfall of "American exceptionalism". By failing to apprise
themselves of why America has been "exceptional" for so long,
rather than assume it has been an accident or a myth of some kind, journalists
may well be helping cause that downfall. As Ayn Rand once
put it so well, this is supremely ironic, since many journalists
see themselves as agents of positive change in the world:

The professional intellectual is the field agent of the army whose
commander-in-chief is the philosopher. The intellectual carries the
application of philosophical principles to every field of human
endeavor. He sets a society's course by transmitting ideas from the
"ivory tower" of the philosopher to the university professor -- to the
writer -- to the artist -- to the newspaperman -- to the
politician -- to the movie maker -- to the night-club singer -- to the
man in the street. The intellectual's specific professions are in the
field of the sciences that study man, the so-called "humanities," but
for that very reason his influence extends to all other
professions. Those who deal with the sciences studying nature have to
rely on the intellectual for philosophical guidance and information:
for moral values, for social theories, for political premises, for
psychological tenets and, above all, for the principles of
epistemology, that crucial branch of philosophy which studies man's
means of knowledge and makes all other sciences possible. The
intellectual is the eyes, ears and voice of a free society: it is his
job to observe the events of the world, to evaluate their
meaning and to inform the men in all the other fields. [bold
added]

Facts matter, but so do ideas, since facts must be
interpreted, even at the level of what to report. Most journalists
regularly blow it in this regard, as exemplified by the Ebola outbreak
of 2014.